The decision last week by the Georgia State Election Board to require a statewide hand count of ballots in the 2024 election has sparked criticism from both sides of the political aisle, with commentators noting that it will likely create unnecessary delays and uncertainty regarding the accuracy of several key races, including potentially the presidential election.
One of Georgia’s U.S. senators, Raphael Warnock (D), has been a prominent critic of the change, describing it as an “effort to turn the democracy on its head.” Warnock said the idea of counting every ballot by hand reminded him of the chaos of the 2000 presidential election, when just a handful of votes separated Democrat Al Gore from Republican George W. Bush’s highly contentious and dubious victory in Florida, weeks after Election Day.
“We all saw the mess that that was, and we don’t need that here again in Georgia, so we will continue to press the issue,” Warnock said in an interview on MSNBC Sunday.
Warnock also suggested that the change by the election board was a recognition that the Democratic nominee for president Kamala Harris was doing better than the Republican candidate Donald Trump.
“The news that Georgia voters [ought to be] paying attention to is this: The fact that they are doing this, means that they know we’re winning,” Warnock added.
The Georgia Election Board made the decision to require the hand counting of all ballots on Friday. Elections officials at the local level will need to do a count of ballots they collect on Election Day before putting them into a voting scanner, to compare the two numbers afterward.
Ostensibly, if any huge discrepancies occur between those two counts, it will allow officials to question the accuracy of the voting machines and determine the real result. But that decision will be left up to the officials themselves, who just this year were given tremendous leeway to conduct inquiries into election outcomes, again based on a rule created by the state election board. A Trump-aligned official, for example, could say that, because the hand count total is off by even one ballot versus the machine total (an outcome that could be due to human error), there should be extensive investigation.
Those inquiries are not limited in any clear way, and can last an indefinite period of time, potentially causing the state to go past the deadline for submitting its electors’ votes to the federal government. If that happens, it would create a situation where neither Trump nor Harris attain a majority of Electoral College votes, which would in turn give Republicans in Congress the opportunity to select Trump as president, even if it was clear to any outside observer that he had lost the state’s popular vote.
The rule change to require a hand count of ballots was criticized by officials on both sides of the political divide.
“Over 200 pages of election code and rules have been implemented since 2020. We have practiced on them, we have trained, we are prepared, we are ready. Do not change this at the last second,” Irwin County elections supervisor Ethan Compton begged the elections board in testimony before their vote on Friday.
Members of the board also spoke out against the measure.
“If this board votes to implement this rule, I think that we put ourselves in legal jeopardy,” said the board’s nonpartisan chair John Fervier.
A spokesperson speaking on behalf of Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr (R) decried the change to the process.
“These proposed rules are not tethered to any statute — and are, therefore, likely the precise type of impermissible legislation that agencies cannot do,” that spokesperson said in a letter to the board.
Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger also expressed opposition to the change last month. “Quick reporting of results is a hallmark of Georgia’s election administration and bolsters voter confidence. Delays in results create a vacuum that leads to misinformation and disinformation,” Raffensperger said.
The changes to the rule will likely be challenged as unlawful and as an unnecessary burden that could possibly disenfranchise voters by allowing local officials to delay the process of having them tabulated. Democrats have already filed a lawsuit against the rule allowing undefined inquiries by local officials, noting in their brief late last month that it violates Georgia election laws.
“If election officials have concerns about possible election irregularities, they are free to voice those concerns at the time of certification, so that they may be considered and adjudicated, by judges, in any subsequent election contest,” the lawsuit, which was filed by the Democratic National Committee, the Georgia Democratic Party, and Democratic county elections officials, states. “But they may not point to those election irregularities (or anything else) as a basis for delaying certification or denying it entirely. Absent a valid court order, certification by the deadline is mandatory.”
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